Professional Work

Immersive Storytelling 

Tales from the Galaxy's Edge: I was the Creature Development Supervisor for this home-based VR experience which places the guest right into the world of Star Wars as a droid repair technician who is caught up in the battle for the galaxy when they crash land on the world of Batuu. (The planet you visit at the Disneyland and Disney World parks)  Similar to Vader Immortal, our Creature TD team handled all articulated assets with a large-ish cast of almost 45 characters including several heroes with full face rigs.  Along with further advancing some of our in-house technical animation practices on this project, I was also the product owner for an in-house Motion Matching system that we were able to ship with running on a mobile processor-based VR device (Oculus Quest 1 & 2).  I was also the product owner for ensuring our previously mentioned in-house runtime deformation tech SimStream could also be used on a mobile processor-based VR device (used for Yoda's robe).  This project also released on PSVR2 with more upgraded character assets.

 

 

VOID Projects: The "hyper-reality" location-based VR experiences for the VOID stages were a truly a memorable series of projects. I was the Lead Creature TD on each of these three projects and each one had new challenges artistically and technically as the platform made advancements each time. Rigging Vanellope for Ralph Breaks VR and helping advance ILM's inhouse SimStream tools for Avengers Damage Control to achieve film-quality deformation on a realistic Dr. Strange & cape are very memorable artistic moments for me. Getting the chance to provide direct support for implementing full body IK solutions and improve those solutions for the guest avatars for each experience is also high up on the list. Nothing beats the memories of seeing new guests gasping out of excitement or jumping for joy from what they experience though! 😄

  

 

Vader Immortal Episodes I, II, III: This "2019 VR game of the year" experience allows the guest to live through a canonical Star Wars story as an apprentice to the most famous villian in film history as he progresses on his quest for power. I was responsible for leading a team of Creature TDs to deliver high quality assets for a variety of target platforms from Oculus Quest, Rift, Rift S and PSVR.  This team handled all articulated assets from weapons and props to hero characters as well as technical animation needs from procedural look-at setups to complex animation layering techniques that allowed us to generate idling motions from a previous pose which minimized our content requirements.

  

Games

Infinite Crisis:  IC was designed to be superhero MOBA game which required lots of unique character rigs and sometimes a really fast turn around on unique animations.  Throughout my time on IC, I developed the Character and Animation pipeline tools, which includes the Rigging Tool Kit, the Animation Tool Kit and the Havok Cloth/Ragdoll tools.  I also assisted in our integration of a source art version control system being integrated into Maya, among other various pipeline and specific discipline related tools.

 

Lord of The Rings Online:  I started my time at Turbine on LOTRO doing integration work with armors and weapons.  Later on, we moved Tech Art intro a centralized shared resource ( and later moved back again to project embedding ), which involved managing pipelines and tools across all projects.  LOTRO is now sharing a lot of tools from newer projects, including the Rigging and Animation Tool kits.  This update to older projects also meant training the active embedded Tech Artists on how to manage their branch of tools for future development.

 

Dungeons & Dragons Online:  My Time on DDO specifically was brief ( mostly doing weapon integration early on as a Temp ), but later on when Tech Art moved to being a centralized resource the tools we were making needed to support our more "Legacy Projects", which means good news for the DDO team as they got access to a lot of cool new ways to work with our newer tools!

Film

Rise of The Planet of The Apes:  I worked on the reboot for the Planet of The Apes series as a Pre-Vis, Post-Vis artist.  This was my first foray into that niche of the Entertainment industry and it was amazingly fun.  Although it involved a lot of generalist work, I managed a lot of our rigs, scene setups, building a few helper scripts for workflows among the team, etc.  I still look fondly back to this project, I gained a lot of experience working on a large feature project - but I also learned a lot about lens measurements, pre-production pipelines and shot composition.  Ahh, good times.

 

Max Lucado's Hermie & Friends:  I worked on the direct-to-DVD Christian children's series for 3 years, managing a cast of about 45 character rigs.  I started out with scene layout and moved into rigging, pipeline work and eventually managing an outsourced animation team.